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SEGA’s free browser RPG Spiral Knights drew gentle approval from the Quintin-creature last month, but at that point it was stranded in the twilight limbo-world of beta status. That has changed. Its shackles are gone. Anyone may now play it, and play it now. Hooray for playing things. I’ve just had a quick fiddle with it, and endorse the sentiment that it’s a pretty slick and charming affair, although the super-derformed hyper-cute style isn’t especially to my tastes in this context. Still – swords and guns.

The game works best when played as a co-op baby-MMO – thus I’d advise anyone interested in embarking upon this heads to our forum and sets up a buddy-search. I’ll stick the post to the front if there’s sufficient interest. So go, be sufficiently interested.

How can you go wrong? A big one would be to limit players to playing ten dungeon floors a day. It takes 10 energy to enter a dungeon floor, your max energy is 100, and you get 100 energy per day.

Multiplayer feels a bit clumsy at times, particularly when you’ve got two or more people trying to navigate a series of switch gates, and they keep shutting each other’s next gate to open their own. Combat is also a bit more chaotic with multiple people, where you can herd monsters fairly well if you play solo. And monsters get a boost when you play multi, though I’m not sure playing multi actually makes it easier to kill them (again because you can herd them fairly well solo).

So you’re saying that a disorganized team produces chaos and madness? I am shocked, shocked sir!

The ten dungeon floors a day thing would likely bother me a lot more if they were pretty short. But getting to floor eight takes sixty energy, which is fine for a run through one tier and another run through half a tier. I guess that takes me about an hour and a half or so, which is pretty good return on a play-for-free game, imho. The profit you make from one run is, right now, enough to buy 100 more energy with some change to spare. This takes away from your equipment fund, but with 200 energy a day, you’ll be getting enough mats to start thinking about crafting and trading for significantly cheaper than buying pre-made armor and weapons from NPCs.

I dunno. The cost of energy is still rising, so this strategy won’t be as practical in a week or two. The act of crafting is the big energy-sink, and I haven’t started trading enough to offset the dent that puts in my resources, so I tend to do it when I don’t feel like doing a longer run.